ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysts have long struggled with questions about what their patients know, can know, or should know about them, in addition to questions about how they work with what they know. S. Freud and his colleagues, as well as "analyst's analysts", of necessity have had to move as fluidly as possible between the "real" relationship and the transference relationship, given the fact that the social milieus in which they practiced often afforded them little ability to maintain personal privacy. Due to the awkwardness of writing about one's patients who are in the field, the professional literature offers little help for understanding the clinical issues that arise in such circumstances. Although the founders of psychoanalysis and training analysts have had relatively transparent working conditions, analysts have traditionally been taught to strive to be as abstemious and anonymous as possible. A psychoanalytic experience may be in some quite subtle ways even more foreign than it was at its inception.
